Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns everything except the plot, and there's not much plot anyway.
I got the inspiration from a movie I was watching and it wouldn't go away, plus Neville is one of the characters I really like and I wanted to write a fanfic starring him. This is a very short oneshot so read and enjoy!
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Neville had often wished his parents were dead.
Not in a bad way, in a good way, it hurt to see his parents like this, yet that didn't seem like a justifiable reason, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
As the snowflakes drifted leisurely in the atmosphere, and the lights from the street lamps flickered, sending pools of light expanding and contracting on the pavement, Neville wondered, like on every Christmas day, the timeless value of things that never changed.
"Hurry up Neville, do you want to freeze out here?" his grandma would say.
There was no one to say it now, instead, Hannah squeezed his hand.
Neville smiled half-heartedly at her, placed his gloved hands over hers, and together, they entered St. Mungos.
The Janus Thickey ward was the same as every year, its residents, isolated from the rest of the world, spent Christmas with as much festive mood as the hospital could muster against the sadness lurking in every word of every patient's story. Tinsel hung limply from the ceiling and a derelict Christmas tree was erected in the corner, the same one as last year, with sparsely scattered presents underneath it, wrapped in cheap wrapping paper.
Today, however, the room seemed empty. Two nurses stood near the unoccupied beds of his lately-departed parents, one was removing the thermos and the two cups which had always been placed atop the bedside drawer between his parents' beds, and the other was emptying the contents in the drawers.
Neville walked towards them with Hannah following closely behind.
The nurse was looking fondly at a piece of paper which she had emptied out, when she sensed Neville's presence behind her, she turned around, smiled sadly and handed the drawing to him.
The paper was yellow and crisp with age, it was a children's crayon drawing of three distorted human beings poorly coloured in. He had forgotten all about it. It was a 7 year old Neville holding the hands of his parents, who were carrying ridiculously large smiles on their faces. He thought he had lost it, but his parents had kept it with them all along.
Along the bottom of the page written in loopy handwriting were the words:
"F.A.M.I.L.Y.
Father And Mother, I Love You"
Now he wished his parents were alive, just to see the shadow of a smile on their face, a spark of recognition in their eye, when they looked at this picture, what did they see? What did they remember?
Even though it hurt him to see his parents the way they were, even though he knew they too felt pain beyond their broken soul, he'd do anything just for that extra moment to hold onto.
"Hannah –" he whispered, showing her the picture.
This was when his gran would place her arms around him.
Hannah hugged him.
"This will be us soon," she whispered back, placing a hand tenderly over their unborn child.